DEZBA Woman of the Desert [SOLD]

DEZBA Woman of the Desert By Gladys A. Reichard

First Edition, hardback with jacket, copyright 1939, 161 pages, numerous illustrations and photographs

Publisher: J. J. Augustine Publisher New York, 1939

Condition: interior pages in very good condition but the paper jacket, although available, is damaged. Previous owner’s name on back of blank title page, ex Libris label on title page.

From the Preface

This book on the pastoral Navajo of the Southwest aims to give a short account of Navajo behavior and attitudes toward their complex social and religious organizations, a picture of daily life and adaptation to objects and notions which have been introduced by the Whites.  The discriminating traveler who has wandered off the highway realizes that the desert supports a people attractive, colorful, even romantic.  Yet his brief contacts with them may leave him with the impression that they are so reserved as to be stolid, so patient as to be shiftless, so mobile as to be irresponsible, so acquisitive as to be beggarly or grasping.

The Navajo have many difficulties due to the rigor of their environment, and to those troubles have been added the seventy-year attempt to adjust themselves to the ways of an alien civilization.  The introduction of white culture has not been gentle or uniform in its methods and today there are many parts of it which the Navajo do not understand while at the same time many of them desire to embrace it.

Since 1933, there has come about a tremendous speeding-up of the transitional phase between old Navajo and modern white ways.  The Navajo with their difficult problems and varied contacts demonstrate for a single locality a conclusion valid for all culture, namely that, regardless of major tendencies or drifts, apparently insignificant factors enter in and function so as to cause stupendous and unpredictable results.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

1.    Matron

2.    Dezba at Home

3.    Grandchildren

4.    Her Mother’s Daughter

5.    Conservative Son

6.    Dezba’s Other Child

7.    Play

8.    Singing

9.    Authority

10.   Return to Earth

11.   Groping

12.   Heir

13.   Visiting